[t]here is a sense in which it is far more difficult to translate Le Nouvel Observateur than a work by Michel Foucault. “Straightforward” is not a word that can readily be applied to language, which, like a confidence man, is often most devious when it seems most plain. Consider, just to bring these abstract matters down to the level of concreteness, exhibit A, from a biography of Foucault, in fact, and written, as it happens, by a journalist from Le Nouvel Obs. The book begins: